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Project

The paradox of Belgian Inequality studies: Belgium less unequal than others (BE-PARADIS). (BE-PARADIS)

Inequality and poverty are high on the agenda of researchers, politicians, and international institutions, and fuel the public discussion at large. The IMF has labelled inequality as the 'defining challenge' of our time because it signals a lack of income mobility and opportunity, and because it has important consequences for growth and macroeconomic stability, and carries a risk of concentrating decision making in the hands of a few. In the last fifteen years also the OECD has gathered 'a significant body of evidence on the increased inequalities of income and opportunities in many countries', and concludes that inequality is 'bad and getting worse' (OECD 2018). In this proposal we start from two observations. First, and curiously enough, most existing statistics for Belgium tell a different story. Based on survey data, Horemans et al. (2011) and Van Rie and Marx (2014) conclude that the Belgian income inequality remained fairly stable between 1985 and the late 2000s. Also the OECD‐report cited above, reports a minor change in the Gini from 0.257 in 1983 to 0.264 in 2011, and even a slight decline since 2004. Similarly, Decoster et al. (2017) could not find evidence that the top incomes in Belgium have benefitted disproportionally from the economic growth since the nineties. Furthermore, the Belgian at‐risk‐of‐poverty rate has remained stable during the last decades. These findings not only stand in sharp contrast with the conclusions for many other countries; they also seem to contradict the widespread perception that inequality, poverty, material deprivation, and insecurity are on the rise. Understanding this 'paradox' is one of the central objectives of our project (and explains the project acronym). Second, Belgium remains notoriously absent from a rapidly expanding track in empirical research, which describes and analyses distributional information in a standard which emulates the framework of national accounts. This new standard is known as DIstributional National Accounts (DINA), and is essentially an extension of the methods proposed by Kuznets, who combined, in a pioneering effort, national income series (macro‐data) with income tax data (micro‐data). Recently, the upgrade of national accounts to incorporate distributional information has been initiated by the late Tony Before completing, please read carefully the instructions in the information file Call 2019 BRAIN‐be 2.0 Call 2019 'National thematic Project': BE‐PARADIS 2 Atkinson, and further developed by a scholars such as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. In early 2018, their team at the Paris School of Economics launched the World Wealth and Income Database, which gives access to data about inequality and other macroeconomic indicators for many countries. Unfortunately, Belgium is missing from this dataset. In this project we will investigate the paradox and bring Belgium to the frontier of international research on inequality by renewed, profound, and critical inquiry of existing and fresh data, concepts, and methods..
Date:15 Dec 2019 →  Today
Keywords:INEQUALITY
Disciplines:Distribution, Welfare economics
Project type:Collaboration project